TRAIL OF TERROR

FBI informant: Taliban already in U.S.

'They can commit a jihad at any time. They hate America'

A man who describes himself as an FBI informant and says he worked to infiltrate the world of terror sympathizers has told a Miami television station that members of the Taliban already are in the United States.

It was the Taliban that controlled the largely ungoverned Afghanistan when the U.S. coalition went into that nation to clean out the influences that allowed Osama bin Laden’s agenda to thrive before the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S.

And the comments from South Floridian David Mahmood Siddiqui come just as the nation is breathing a sigh of relief over the death of one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, and the capture of the other.

“I am an informant and all I can tell you is that Talibans are walking freely right here in the soil of America right now, right now,” he told CBS4 in Miami.

The interview was conducted by CBS4 Chief Investigator Michele Gillen.

He told the station that America is at risk of another such attack any time.

“They can commit a jihad at any time, they hate America, you have an enemy living here in American soil, do not know when they will take action to kill innocent Americans,” he said.

Siddiqui reportedly was involved in developing evidence in a Florida alleged terror case. At the conclusion of a 29-day trial, Muslim cleric Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, the 77-year-old former head of a mosque in Miami, was convicted of supporting terrorism.

The station obtained some of the transcripts of undercover investigatory materials in that case, and at one point, Khan said of the attempted Times Square bombing, “It would have been great had it worked out … such a brave heart.”

In that case, the government claimed Khan sent $50,000 to the Taliban in Pakistan.

“Keep one thing in mind, it may be $50,000, but you can buy an M-16 for 50 bucks in Pakistan. You can buy a belt to blow yourself away for 50 bucks,” the station reported he said.

His work included undercover stints in Miami, Pakistan and other places, he said.

In the Boston attack, a picture already has emerged of two suspects living on taxpayer funded benefits while they plotted to kill innocent people.

The Boston Herald reported Wednesday that dead terrorist suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his wife and young daughter all collected welfare until 2012.

Tamerlan and his now-imprisoned brother, suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, also received benefits through their parents for an unknown period of time after they came to the U.S. about 10 years ago.

The Dagestan natives arrived in the U.S. a decade ago, and the elder made a return visit to south Asia last year – for a period of about six months.

It remains unclear whether the brothers were part of larger group or jihadist network, and the government may be the one making that more difficult to discover, too.

The biggest controversy in the investigation into the terror attack is the decision by the federal government to read Miranda rights to the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and choose to try him in criminal court rather than designate him an enemy combatant and put him on trial before a military tribunal.

WND reported Saturday that Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., John McCain, R-Ariz., and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., had urged President Obama to hold the surviving brother as a potential enemy combatant, denying him a government-appointed attorney and other legal rights under the “Law of War” so investigators could learn about other possible attacks.

“The suspect, based upon his actions, clearly is a good candidate for enemy combatant status. We do not want this suspect to remain silent,” they agreed.

However, as WND reported two days later, the Justice Department announced Tsarnaev was arraigned in his hospital room on one count of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death.

As WND also reported, the timing was a bit odd, according to Andrew C. McCarthy, the lead U.S. prosecutor in the case against Omar Abdel Rahman and his collaborators in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

“It would have been good to keep him out of the criminal justice system for as long as they could have,” McCarthy told WND.

WND reported earlier that its own sources were documenting the case was linked to Iran, a report that unsettled the Islamist regime there.

It was an April 16 exclusive on WND reported that the Boston bombings were tied to the regime’s Quds Forces and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. The source added that the regime from its operational centers in South Asia is actively recruiting a new wave of terrorists from non-Arabs and from Islam’s Sunni sect to avoid any trace back to Shiite Iran and Hezbollah and to either present an apparent link to al-Qaida or individuals acting on their own.

The April 16 report also reflected WND reports of Dec. 11 and Feb. 28 in which sources within Iran said the Quds Forces were preparing for terrorist attacks within six months in the United States in collaboration with al-Qaida factions and that an operational team was on its way to the U.S.